At the risk of scandalizing my friends and colleagues with whom I live in the modern world, I begin with a story from the Christian scriptures, and if that were not enough, with a miracle story (that of the Gad’arene Demoniac Healed), and if that were not enough, a miracle story whose truth I am, moreover, affirming. I quote from the eighth chapter of Luke’s Gospel:1
26. And they arrived at the country of the Gad’arenes, which is over against Galilee. 27. And when he went forth to land, there met him out of the city a certain man, which had devils long time, and ware no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs. 28. When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high? I beseech thee, torment me not. 29. (For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For oftentimes it had caught him: and he was kept bound with chains and in fetters; and he brake the bands, and was driven of the devil into the wilderness.) 30. And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him. 31. And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep. 32. And there was there a herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them. 33. Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked. 34. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country. 35. Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.
Now, before I am too quickly pigeonholed as backwardly evangelical (although I think it entirely possible to be wonderfully and progressively evangelical, as I try to be myself), allow me to assure you that I do not believe in demons. Demons simply do not exist. Moreover, and just to impress upon you the extent of my sanity, I think it irresponsible to believe in them. Yet, let me remind you, I am affirming, as true, the miracle story from Luke I quoted above. Jesus, I am claiming, on a fine Gad’arenes afternoon, in liberating the demon-possessed man, cast his demons, the whole legion of them, into pigs, who in turn cast themselves into a lake. That’s the gospel truth, and were I not a Quaker, I’d swear to it.
My topic is truth, and more specifically, the fate this vaunted notion has suffered under the auspices of postmodern incredulities,2 and how Christians, who are committed to a truth that makes us free and is at once our way and our life, are to proceed faithfully in our rightfully skeptical age. I am employing this example as a way to analyze the problem, and to point toward a notion of truth that I hope allows us a way forth in our time and for our time,3 a notion of truth that is both inspired by and, I hope, resonates with at least a certain Christianity. By “a certain Christianity,” I mean one that does not find its bearings in a commitment to some or other metaphysical picture (i.e., a prior commitment to the way things must “be”), but is animated by a living Spirit, the spirit of a living God.
But allow me first to return to my illustration, and the aporia I have created for myself in coupling a denial of the existence of demons with an affirmation – though now rather embarrassing, because at least seemingly contradictory – of the truth of the story of the exorcism at Gad’arenes. This is precisely the kind of intellectual tension that has, over the past couple of hundred years, divided the modern church, and most major denominations internally too, along lines that pit theological conservatives against theological liberals.4 The intractability and viciousness of this struggle, moreover, has been among the motivations, for many of us who find ourselves caught up in these dilemmas, to attempt to find another truth. Might we catch a glimpse of a truth neither liberal and modern nor conservative and pre-modern (dare I call it postmodern?) – a truth not caught up in this battle over truth, a truth whose realization does not have to await the final consummation of knowledge in the resolution of all disagreements, but a truth that makes us free, i.e., that frees us to live faithfully in an uncertain world, and that accords with our role as hearers and doers of the Word and not its possessors?
What qualifies liberalism in the sense that I employ here is precisely the aforementioned embarrassment at belief in miracle stories like the one above, founded in a root adherence to, and an even deeper complicity with, modern science, a living of life in the world out of which modern science emerged and that modern science itself recognizes as the real world. This does not preclude a certain spirituality of the whole – the idea that nature is spiritual and so “liberalism” is not simply secularism – but at the level of causation it is the natural rather than the supernatural that is both accessible to inquiry and delimits the range of what counts as real. In the modern world, miracles (not the miraculous, but miracles5), which presuppose or require recourse to the interruption of, or intersection with, a Hinterwelt (a “world behind the world”) of spiritual entities and causes, do not happen. In the modern world – the one in which you and I live – there are no such “supernatural” causal agents. It is not that supernatural causes exist but our modern, scientistic myopia precludes our apprehending them, nor is it that they might exist but that the limitations of our current scientific methodologies force us into agnosticism regarding them.6 Instead, in the modern world, there simply are no such things.
Now, what makes me so sure is no epistemological matter. There is no way to prove by means of modern thought that demons do not exist; life in the modern world is in itself their refutation. There is simply no place in the modern world for demons. For example, as someone with a sister diagnosed with schizophrenia who loves her deeply, when she is ill I do not take her to an exorcist but to a psychiatrist, and I am deeply offended when some fundamentalist simpleton suggests that I do the former. Why? Because she is not demon possessed. There are no such things as demons, and it would be as irresponsible as ineffectual, even cruel, to try to help her by ridding her of something that is not there in the first place. If you disagree with me here perhaps we can book you a hospital room next to my sister’s and I can drop in and visit you while I am seeing her. Ça, c’est la vie moderne.
Theological liberals, when confronted with the miracle stories, have already performed their own exorcism, and have chased the demons of supernaturalism even beyond the lake of fire into actual nonexistence (and let us not miss the fact that there is something of the miraculous in this feat itself) in a process perhaps most helpfully described as demythologizing.7 For theological liberals want to say not that the miracle stories are not true, but that they are not literally true. They are rather true for theological liberals in the only manner possible for us moderns: in a metaphorical, figurative sense. Here resurrection is taken as psychological reawakening, exodus becomes economic emancipation, and demon possession is understood as mental illness – for which we still need great physicians, though preferably ones who have had the good sense to attend medical school. On the liberal reading, the “exorcism” performed by Jesus may well have “worked,” but it did so as a psycho-somatic phenomenon, explicable on the same terms as the “miraculous deeds” of contemporary faith healers, when the latter are not thought – as is most commonly the case – to be simply charlatans who line their velvet pockets by the desperation of the ignorant downtrodden.
This dismissal of the truth of the biblical claims taken on what would at least appear to be their own terms8 (the contemporary arrogance of taking as merely mythological what once passed as gospel truth) inspires conservatives’ reactionary gesture and “reverse ideology critique.” The orthodox are not entirely unwarranted in their objections to the restrictions on truth imposed by a hegemonic and cocksure liberalism that smugly reduces to nothing all that its methodological nets are incapable of snaring and bringing on board. What makes the “scientistic interpretation” the fact of the matter and the “mythological interpretation” a naive overlay? Are these not each interpretations in their turn? How do we know which is the truth, and which the distortion?9 The moderns’ paternalistic head-patting of the ancients may be a kind of intellectual imperialism across the ages, with all of the attendant power plays and coercions, founded in the same Eurocentrism, and morally no better than any other kind of imperialism. The result is an ideological impasse, where the facts that should be able to mediate between the diverse interpretations turn out to be products of these interpretations themselves.
In this context, I characterize postmodernism as the recognition that there are no “facts” that are not produced10 within some context or other and integral with some way of life or other. Needless to say, then, many thoughtful theological conservatives have something of an attraction to a certain postmodernism (even if most conservatives, and most liberals for that matter, fear it like the plague), since it gives them an alibi to believe what from a liberal perspective is impossible, and liberalism is only another perspective, after all. Why buy into the interpretation carved out by secularists bent on excising faith rather than the divinely inspired “interpretation” wrought across the ages by the fathers (sic)11 of faith? And theological conservatives have a point, sort of. Except – and this is the fly in the ointment, or, if you will, the devil in the pig – demons do not exist.
Put in slightly different terms, we can perhaps conceive of postmodernism as the surrendering12 – because either hermeneutically naive or morally suspect or both – of the project of locating a reality outside of interpretations that could effectively adjudicate between competing interpretations of that reality, a neutral, pre-interpretive reality that would itself be thought of, ontologically speaking, as the “truth,”13 or, epistemologically speaking, as the anchor for “truth.”14 The postmodern exigency would then become the re-conceptualization not of what we might take as being true, but of truth itself. And that is what I sketch here: a postmodern revision of truth, one that ties truths as facts to ways of life, but that nevertheless does not abandon truth to whatever happens to be currently believed at any given time and place, that loses truth in the “relativism without compass”15 so feared by lovers of truth, in the incommensurability and indifference between a “Legion” of interpretations each desiring to possess us with its “truth,” and driving us to madness (and out to sea) in the process.
To this end, I want to reiterate my claim that Jesus really did16 cast out demons. It is not that what he was really dealing with were the mentally ill,17 but that along with his contemporaries he called their afflictions (knowingly or not) demon possession; he really did cast out demons. But I correlatively want to claim that my best buddy from my college days, psychiatrist Dr Curt Thompson, really does treat chemical/electrical brain malfunctions pharmaceutically and therapeutically. He is not really casting out demons, but along with his contemporaries he calls it medical science; he really does practice psychiatry. It would, therefore, have been as irresponsible for my psychiatrist friend to provide the demoniac at Gad’arene with Haldol as it would be for a quack or fanatic to try to exorcize the demons from my sister.18 In neither case would there have been a context in which these respectively anachronistic performances would have or could have been meaningful; in neither case would such an “other-worldly” action have had anything “real” upon which to work. Put another way: Jesus was not “deluded” (however innocently) when he cast out demons, because there used to be demons (and there may well be so again), but, at present, in the world in which we live, there are no demons. Likewise, there did not used to be synapses traversed by electrical current in the brain (and at some point in the future there may be no longer, as they may go the way of phlogiston), but there certainly are now, and we would be fools – nay, insane – to pretend there are not.
Now, to be clear, I am not arguing that the same set of phenomena that were interpreted as demon possession in a mythological framework are today interpreted as chemical/electrical brain malfunctioning, an assumption shared by both liberals and conservatives who then argue over whose interpretation is correct and most faithfully mirrors the facts. Far more radically, I am suggesting that there is no “same set of phenomena” from the ancient world to the modern world,19 and this because “a world” is itself the site of phenomena, of the events that transpire and the entities that appear within it. A world consists of already interpreted things (persons, entities, and events) among which we live our lives. Things only occur in a world. The ancient and the modern world are not two ways of interpreting a single world: the ancient and the modern interpretations each give us a world – precisely, a place to live. If we can get past the idea that there is a bare event that then gets interpreted in one way or another, but instead understand the interpretation of the event as constitutive of the event itself, we can arrive at the conclusion that Jesus drove out demons and we have recourse to psychiatric pharmaceuticals, each necessarily and factually so, without the idea that one of these versions of events has to be true and the other false.
What is true in Jesus’s employment of the discourse of demonology, what makes his discourse on demons really true, and what realizes demons and brings them to life is the manner in which this discourse and communal understanding allowed life to be fully lived, that is, enhanced, deepened, broadened and liberated from death for both demoniacs and for their community. What makes the story of the casting out of the demons true is that, in its age and for its setting, it creates a way forth and makes life possible where there was death.20 This is precisely what makes the truths of modern science true, too. In an age where the exorcism of demons has reached its apogee in their total extirpation, truth calls for other truths, truths that allow us to live our lives richly, fully, and abundantly. Demons are no longer a truth for us because the world in which demons exist is no longer the one in which we can live.
This discussion points to a sense of truth that answers not first to the cold neutrality of facts, but to the fragile, needy, and also glorious and infinitely valuable lives of human beings. It requires that we loosen factuality’s grip on our sense of the truth, that we re-index truth to life, and that we understand the factuality of facts and the truthfulness of our truths in the context of a world in which we live.21 Such a truth retains its root meaning as faithfulness – and so this renewed sense of truth is anything but new – but where that which governs truth is not faithfulness to facts but faithfulness to the lives of persons, or the faithfulness of persons to persons. In this sense, what gives a truth claim its bearings, what makes a truth true, has not first to do with what “is” and the correspondence of propositions to it,22 but its serviceability (and so I am never far from pragmatism here), its place in a context of faithfulness to the ones whose lives it serves. I am suggesting, in short, that “being true to” is the core sense of truth, of which facts are subservient matters.
But far from bricking us into a modernist world and accepting its truths as necessarily true, the recognition of the requirement that truths prove themselves “true to life” is simultaneously an imperative: our truths, if they are to be true, must lead to life.23 When they do not, we have not only every right, but also an absolute obligation, to dispute them and to demand that our truths be true to life as lived24 – as the gospels say, abundantly. Facts, simply by dint of being facts, do not get a free pass; like the law, they are made for man25 (and by man), man is not made for (or by) the facts.
Would this be so very far from what we might hope of a responsibly contemporary, while deeply Christian notion of truth, a truth that we are “in” and that is “in” us, rather than a truth that we have, a living and personal truth (the truth of life for life) rather than an objective and indifferent factuality, a truth that is “spiritual” before it is epistemological? But we are at the wrong end of a very long discussion to claim for this anything more than the status of an inquiry.
1 King James Version. The parallel passages in the other Synoptics are Mark 5:1–20, and Matthew 8:28–34.
2 J.F. Lyotard famously and perceptively defines the postmodern as an “incredulity toward metanarratives [grands recits].” Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv. For Lyotard, meta-narratives are not merely all-encompassing stories that set the terms of how we tell our own stories, which would make them the narrative embodiment of Weltanschauungen (worldviews), but stories that are told of and along with those we tell to authenticate the stories we tell, including the grand stories that constitute worldviews. If Lyotard is correct, postmodernism is less a disbelief in truth than it is a disbelief in the reign of theory, a disbelief that a truth can finally be founded and authenticated by a universal rationality. In other words, the postmodern is a rejection of this main tenet of modernism, the story that modernism told itself about itself. Nothing else.
3 Indeed, I will argue that this “making a way forth” is the very “essence” of truth itself.
4 These grand, sweeping terms can only be semi-precise. They are caricatures, and name broad trajectories rather than applying without nuance to any particular flesh and blood thinker, but I hope no less useful on that account.
5 A “medical miracle” is no less a miracle because it has a naturalistic explanation, just as one of Jesus’s healings is no less a miracle because it has a supernatural explanation. Though easily confused with magic, a miracle is something else.
6 This is the compromise settled upon by many educated, contemporary Christian “conservatives”: science gives us knowledge of natural events but is set up to perceive only these; for knowledge of the supernatural we have to rely upon revelation. This epistemological duality generally corresponds to an ontological dualism. Christians in science who work professionally within the modernist framework might therefore acknowledge (in their capacity as believers) the possibility of miracles when worshipping on Sunday morning, but would not (and could not, in their capacity as scientists) acknowledge one in their lab.
7 Nietzsche understood this well and deeply with his (in)famous declaration (although, to be accurate, it is uttered by the Madman, a literary persona of Nietzsche’s) that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” (The Gay Science, section 125). There is a real temptation to read this claim as a sociological one, as the idea that, by orienting ourselves by means of a thisworldly humanism in which God does not figure as a necessary and integral referent, we have “for all intents and purposes” killed off God as a living, effective presence in our lives, but that the claim actually has nothing to say about the actual existence of God, which continues on the same (or never was in the first place) regardless of our acknowledgment or denial of it. (A temptation to which we should perhaps, in certain contexts, succumb, for example, in those where certain overanxious and overly militant Christians use this obvious “error” in Nietzsche as an excuse to dismiss the important – on my view, anyway – opportunity for self-reflection that Nietzsche offers to traditional theistic belief.) But what if Nietzsche were actually claiming more, and that God really had, literally, ontologically speaking, ceased to exist based upon the vagaries of human belief? What if “existence” were a category (and perhaps not even a necessary one) by which we, in certain historical epochs and under certain circumstances, organized and constituted experience such that the very existence or non-existence of something was a function of whether or not human beings in some area and era or other (and differently from one area or era to another) applied or withheld the term “existence” to or from it? In this case, Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century European contemporaries could in fact kill God, and demons could have once in fact existed (in first century Palestine, for example), but not for us. (Should we be concerned about the extinction rate of mythological species too, or perhaps even of the extinction of the species “mythological”? It strikes me that this was in part also Nietzsche’s concern, for in the speech evoked above, after the accusation of deicide, the speaker goes into a near rage at the presumption and hubris demonstrated by such an act: “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” Nietzsche was as iconoclastic as anyone when it came to breaking down myths, but a staunch defender of mythologizing: “What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”) What counts for me here is trying to get past the claim that God really does or does not exist, and that our claims about that fact are a reflection of it (and so are true or false on that basis), but that the term “existence” is something that we attribute to something, or not, depending upon whether or not that claim, in the longer term, as best we can make out, leads to life or does not. Whereas truth has for the most part been taken as being measured by existence (it is the actual being of something that constitutes or founds its truth), I am suggesting (without denying this for truth qua factuality) that it is rather, or at least more deeply, existence that is to be measured by truth. What we take as existing is a function of what leads to life for us. On my schema, this is as true of anything else as it is of God. “To be is to belong in a life-giving world.” But this does not mean that these things do not really exist, or that this truth is merely subjective. This is what existence means, what truth signifies. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181–2.
8 One could with some credibility argue that the correspondence sense of truth that is the premise for both liberals and conservatives in their respective attitudes toward the “facts” recorded in scripture simply was not operative, or at least not operative in the same manner, in an ancient culture as it is in ours, and that these accounts were simply not intended to be heard on this level at all but were intended to convey something else. Such a claim, for which I have significant sympathies, does not affect my overall argument here, even if it already undermines (my goal as well) the liberal versus conservative framework in which I here (heuristically) pose it.
9 The options appear to be either to reject contemporary interpretations of the plain facts about demon possession as “modern/humanistic” perversions of the plain facts of scripture (i.e., to take the ancient presentation of the facts as the truth and to therefore reject the modern interpretation), or to accept the explanations of modern science (which rule out demon possession) as what was really going on (then as now), and see the interpretation of demon possession as a mythological overlay required by a pre-scientific society (i.e., to take the modern, materialist presentation as more or less true and therefore reject the mythological as at least factually false).
10 I try to retain the ambiguity of this term, as pointed out by Emmanuel Levinas, wherein its meanings as “making” (an automobile is produced) and of “bringing forth and showing” (a play is produced) are simultaneously preserved. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 26.
11 Some mothers too, of course; but with the exception of a virgin, a couple of other Marys, the odd and usually highly suspect mystic or saint, the at least recorded explicit contribution of women was, to our detriment, minimal.
12 Felt by some as despair, by others as emancipation.
13 What in fact is, prior to any interpretation of it.
14 As that to which a true proposition corresponds.
15 A “radical” relativism, one “rooted” in that to which it is relative, is to be applauded, however.
16 Is it true that Jesus actually cast out demons? Was it true that Jesus actually cast out demons? At the risk of being perceived as overly scholastic in the pejorative sense, I, technically speaking, maintain that these two questions are not necessarily the same. For while it was the case (given Jesus’s world, the world in which such an act was not only possible but requisite) that Jesus cast out demons, from the modern perspective (from the perspective of the world in which such acts are no longer possible, and thus most irresponsible) it is no longer the case that Jesus cast out demons. To make the claim that it is true that Jesus cast out demons is to “assume” (in the presumptive sense) a position that transcends the epochs and their corresponding ways of life, as if a single perspective could encompass all others. This presumption is the liberal/modernist perspective. (It is only fair to admit that my attempt to critique this presumption arises from, and is only possible, from within it; I am a participant in the liberal/modern world I am attempting here to delimit.)
17 Is it also not that his “casting out of demons” was really some kind of therapy, or a placebo effect, or simply illusory, or a literary, hagiographic convention.
18 The faith healers of our day have never gotten beyond this model; they are not so much wrong as anachronistic. Whereas the liberals erroneously want to dismiss the truths of the ancients (or “reduce” them to myths), the conservatives erroneously want to absolutize them, to insist upon them as timeless facts.
19 The question about what we would have seen had we had a video camera (or a device for measuring brain activity, or what have you) at the scene of the story – as if that were the measure of truth – is provocative but pointless, because had there been a video camera on the scene by the Galilee then the events would have been different (as they transpired without a video camera). One does not require Heisenberg and the indeterminacy principle (wherein the observation of the results would affect the results) at the level of phusis (nature), but merely a modicum of media savvy, to know that the presence of a camera changes the nature of how events themselves transpire, of which the “creation” of celebrities is the most obvious if also the most grating example. Certain things are possible in the video age that were not possible previously, and certain things are impossible now that were not before. Modes of perception constitute the realities perceived.
20 “Casting out demons” was the best (meaning most life-giving, meaning most truthful – or at least a candidate for these designations) explanation for the phenomena at the time, remembering that these explanations constitute these phenomena at least to some degree. But “casting out demons” is as untrue in our time as “regulating the electronic firing between brain synapses” would have been in ancient Palestine; there is simply no contemporary meaning context in either case for such claims to ring true. Furthermore, the use of “ring true” here is deliberate, for a truth is, in part, an attunement between some state of affairs and a context in which they can be understood. Where the possibility of this attunement is lacking, truth is an impossibility.
21 To insist that there either are demons, or there are not, and that this governs our notion of truth means that we have already capitulated to the epistemolo-ontological version of truth that has dominated Western thinking; to claim that we already know the truth about truth, to know a priori that the truth about truth is itself already an epistemo-ontological matter. Postmodernism is both the spur and the opportunity to rethink this otherwise dogmatic truth about truth. To claim that our truths are not really true, or are only subjectively true, is to have already made objectivity the meaning kernel of truth and to have allowed a derived and secondary sense of faithfulness (faithfulness of a proposition to a state of affairs) to stand in for its essence.
22 Understanding and expressing states of affairs with accuracy and integrity is – within certain contexts – entirely plausible as a constitutive aspect of faithful relationships, but it hardly exhausts them. Being entirely forthcoming with my wife about my ongoing infidelities to her would not be a mark of “truth,” but its mockery.
23 This is a “meta-”project insofar as I am not suggesting that we can hear with other than modern ears, but that we can hear ourselves hearing with modern ears, and it is this that creates the possibility of a critical distance opened up from within, and thus the perpetual possibility of critique and re-formation.
24 If we shift the locus of truth from “that which we are interpreting” to “the ability of an interpretation to bring life,” we are then able to constitute and live our truths with at once utter seriousness and with a thoroughgoing and humbling sense of their contingency, to constitute living truths that we are not only responsible to, but as much responsible for. (Here the calling to science is not diminished, but made even more august. Here the “ethics” of scientific practice is not an add on, the course in grad school most likely to be skipped, but at the very heart of science.)
25 Woman too, of course, but I opt for resonance and the euphonic here over the politically correct – apologies due and offered. See Mark 2:27.